Time Calculator In PHP

18th June 2008 - 1 minute read time

Note: This post is over a year old and so the information contained here might be out of date. If you do spot something please leave a comment and we will endeavour to correct.

Use the following function to work out how long it has been since an event in years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes and seconds.

function getAge($year,$month,$day,$hour=0,$minute=0,$second=0){
 $age = mktime($hour,$minute,$second,$month,$day,$year);
 $age = time()-$age;
 return array('years'=>$age/60/60/24/365,
  'months'=>$age/60/60/24/12,
  'weeks'=>$age/60/60/24/7,
  'days'=>$age/60/60/24,
  'hours'=>$age/60/60,
  'minutes'=>$age/60,
  'seconds'=>$age);
}

The practical use of this function is that you can work out how old someone is from their birthday. Here is an example of the function in use.

// someone's birthday
echo '<pre>'.print_r(getAge(1984,10,4),true).'</pre>';

Which would output the following:

Array
(
 [years] => 23.721673198884
 [months] => 721.53422646605
 [weeks] => 1236.9158167989
 [days] => 8658.4107175926
 [hours] => 207801.85722222
 [minutes] => 12468111.433333
 [seconds] => 748086686
)

Any function like this can be tested by putting in the current time, if you get zero across the board then the function works.

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